Urban Modeling Training

Join Christoph Reinhart of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a hands-on 2 day workshop that will teach participants the power of new modeling software to aid in sustainable urban design.

Cities across the planet are growing at an unprecedented speed. To accommodate therising number of residents, city governments need to densify and expand while managing their carbon emissions. At the same time, to attract and maintain a competitive workforce, cities have to ensure that the quality of their built environment is not sacrificed at the expense of density. The overall goal is thus to design sustainable, high density neighborhoods that combine building resource–efficiency with quality indoor and outdoor spaces, which in turn support community building and favor human powered modes of transportation.

To help city governments and their consultants to develop such neighborhoods, the Sustainable
Design Lab at MIT has developed an urban modeling platform called umi. This platform calculates urban performance indicators related to operational and embodied energy use as well as access to
daylight and neighborhood walkability. In this course we will present the science and models underlying umi in a manner that is accessible to an audience of urban planners, city governments, utilities, consultants and architects. Participants will acquire a range of urban analysis techniques and be exposed to results from several umi case studies world-wide.

Specific simulation outputs that will be discussed are:

• Operational and embodied building energy use
• Neighborhood-wide daylight availability
• Walkability

The course format are formal instructions, in-class discussions, software tutorials and exercises. Participants are expected to bring a newer Windows laptop with Rhinoceros 3D and umi 2.1 already installed on it.

TRAINING DATES & TIMES
This is a two-day workshop

• August 4 – 10 am to 5 pm
• August 5 – 9 am to 4 pm

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT, he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab, an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools, and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. Christoph’s work has been recognized with various awards among them the ARUP Best Paper Prize at Building Simulation 2009 and the 2010 Leon Gaster Price from the Society of Light and Lighting.

Building Energy Exchange reserves the right to cancel the workshop until July 29, 2016.